Image: Shutterstock
Babies may not be able to say ‘yuck’ just yet, but that’s one expression written all over their faces as soon as you try to give them that spoonful of medicine. On your first attempt itself, you’ll find spitballs flying helter-skelter, and ten rounds of baby wipes will not be enough to clean the syrup from your little one’s chin and mouth.
In fact, feeding medicine to a baby (let’s not even get into the fussy baby tangent; we’re simply talking about the average Joes and Janes here) has been universally touted as one of the biggest challenges of parenthood. Even more so than potty training!
Well, all your baby-medicine-feeding woes will be gone forever if you try this one simple hack that this genius UK mom has come up with!
Helena Lee’s (she’s a nurse practitioner by day and super smart mom by night, FYI) crazy simple hack was posted by her on her Facebook account and since then has been shared more than 120,000 times by moms (and by mommy’s friends and well-wishers too) all over the world because that’s just how good it is!
Helena’s son, Alfie, had been taken down with fever. And no matter how hard she tried to feed him the medicine so he’d turn back to the happy little kid he is, he just refused to take the thing in his mouth and instantly spat it out instead of gulping it down.
But Helena, being the smart and persistent mommy she is, was unfazed by the challenge presented to her and remembered a neat trick, which helped her son to instantly chug down the spoonful of medicine without crying or throwing tantrums.
All she did was give her son a spoonful of sugar mixed with the medicine in a syringe covered with the baby bottle nipple and voila! Little Alfie gulped down the medicine without even realizing that he was actually having medicine!
Image: Facebook: helena.richardson3
In her viral post, captioned ‘FOR ALL MUMMIES,’ Helena mentioned that “…for the last 24 hours I’ve struggled to get Alfie to take Calpol, he has ended up covered in half of it where he spits it at me……Then I remembered seeing this trick.” And she used this trick to her and her son’s advantage. The best part was that it totally worked!
If you still don’t believe that something this simple can actually work, Helena even put proof to show to all skeptics that this hack is for real.
In the pictures she posted, you can see her eight-week-old son sucking on his baby bottle nipple that has a syringe full of fever medicine inside without making a fuss.
Helena tried to egg on other mothers to try out in her post saying, “Not 1 bit got wasted and no tears.”
As for the secret place where she found this hack, Helena said she couldn’t remember when or where exactly she found it but she remembers with confidence that “it was most definitely online somewhere when I was browsing.”
Image: Credit: Pinterest
And one can’t deny that this hack has been around for a while. You’ll find plenty of similar images floating around on Pinterest. But the credit for making it viral goes to Helena, who’s also has a four-year-old son apart from Alfie.
She explained, “I decided to share the trick as I have quite a few mummy friends on my Facebook and thought if I hadn’t seen it before then surely a few of them probably hadn’t either, and I decided I couldn’t be the only one trying to get a little one to take medicine.”
Meanwhile, if you were wondering whether little Alfie is okay, he’s doing just fine now.
Do you have any such useful tips up your sleeve? Be sure to share them in the comments below so that other mommies can benefit too.
